In today’s world, when we’ve got huge forces of globalisation, climate change and the increasing power of large companies all around us, we can all feel pretty insignificant and meaningless at times. And it’s very tempting, when we see trends that we don’t like, just to get resigned to them and to passively sit back and just hope and pray that some politician, or somebody else is going to put things right.
But the 30 year history of Traidcraft, actually should give us hope that it doesn’t have to be like that and that a few individuals with vision and commitment and enthusiasm can actually change the way the whole world works.
When Traidcraft’s founders first set out on this venture, they were dismissed as a band of irrelevant “do-gooders”, people who had nice ideas but who were really pretty unrealistic and were probably going to be quite irrelevant.
At best, they were going to help a small number of very lucky producers from whom they could buy products. And I have to admit that when I started out as a Fair Trader myself in the 1990s I too thought mainly about the specific producer groups who would benefit from the products I sold.
But since joining Traidcraft on the staff eight years ago, I’ve been able to see a much bigger picture of how Traidcraft has been able to change the world.
Yes, it’s vital that we have been able to help thousands upon thousands of individual producers through our purchases from them, helping them to get hold of clean water, of better education, helping them to receive training and to develop sustainable enterprises that are going to provide a livelihood for themselves and their families and communities for many years.
But actually, through Traidcraft’s work and the work of our supporters up and down the country, in churches, week after week, we’ve actually been able to go far beyond that. We’ve been able to encourage big companies to get into fair trade; there’s now over £700 million worth of Fairtrade goods sold in the UK alone and 7 million producers are benefitting from fair trade activity at the moment.
Big companies, who dismissed fair trade as “irrelevant, impossible and unrealistic” are now taking increasing proportions of their turnover into Fairtrade themselves. That’s a really encouraging example of how Traidcraft has been able to the change the bigger picture through the small actions it’s been taking at a church and organisational level.
But wider still than that., we’ve been able to transform the way the world of business works by modelling how to be an ethical business, and our pioneering work in social accounting and our campaigning for changes to company law means that ethical agendas are things that every boardroom in the country needs to consider. And that’s beginning to change the way companies think about themselves and the ways in which they behave.
And Traidcraft’s been an organisation with a remarkable record for innovation and pioneering. We were one of the groups that set up the Fairtrade Foundation that’s made the Fairtrade Mark available, we’re one of the original founders of Cafédirect, we’ve set up Shared Interest, we’ve brought whole new areas into fair trade: cotton, rubber, charcoal.
None of this – none of the impact of Traidcraft’s trading activities or of our development projects or of our wider work – none of it could have happened without the faithful and enthusiastic dedication of thousands of our supporters around the country.
We’ve really been a movement of individuals who each, on their own, probably couldn’t have changed much but together have been able to have a real impact – ordinary people creating extraordinary change.
But as Christians perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by this because we know God will often work through the weak and apparently insignificant. He chose David as a boy to kill Goliath, he plucked Gideon from obscurity to kill the Mideonites, he built his church upon a team of poor fishermen.
And so each of us should be given new hope that these great global forces that we may fear actually are things that we can do something about. We can have hope, but it's also a challenge that we do get on and do something.
So as we reflect on Traidcraft's 30th birthday, let us really be encouraged by all that’s been achieved but challenged too, by everything that remains to be done.
